4 Singapore-based data scientists share how data has been impacting lives

(L-R) Data scientists Gene Yan Ooi, Dr. Yongli Hu, Eugene Yan, and Dr. Shonali Krishnaswamy.

Data science has been touted as the job of the future and a lucrative career, according to a Tech in Asia salary survey of data scientists.

But going deeper, there’s more to the job than just the salary. I spoke with four Singapore-based data scientists on their lives and what they think of the emerging field.

What made you pursue a career as a data scientist?

A mix of interests and skills

Since his undergraduate days pursuing psychology and statistics, Eugene Yan has always been interested in how people perceive, think, and behave. This required measuring perceptions, behavior outcomes, and making inferences from the data.

Along the way, he gained an interest and picked up machine learning, which, according to him, helps people learn from historical data and make predictions. Equipped with these skills, he started his career as a data scientist when he joined Lazada’s data science team in 2015.

Long-term love

Dr. Shonali Krishnaswamy was a data scientist as far as she could remember. “I started studying data science when it was called data mining,” she said. “I have always been interested in understanding data and the discipline of data mining, particularly the challenges of making data mining a reality in terms of mobile devices and mobile users.”

Dr. Krishnaswamy completed a PhD in distributed data mining at Monash University. Then, she joined A*STAR in Singapore, where she realized the real-world impact data science could create. Now on a newfound journey, she is the CTO and co-founder of AIDA Technologies.

A natural fit

“I kind of fell into it,” claimed Gene Yan Ooi, co-founder of Shentilium, a deep learning and machine learning consultancy.

According to him, the combination of his education, family, work experience, and personal inclinations made data science a “natural choice.” He also credited his father, a computer science professor, as one of the major factors.

Getting away from the lab

Dr. Yongli Hu, a researcher at the data analytics department of the Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R) at A*STAR, shared that her original background was in biomedical sciences. But her lack of dexterity for wet lab experimentation and her love to work freely steered her toward a career in data science.

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